Is there any effort or discussion yet about collaborative use of libreoffice applications?

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Marc,

	A few thoughts on this thread:

On 15/12/2020 11:36, Marc Roos wrote:
>> What I was getting at was a way to make a fat client collaborative. 
> 
> Calc has a share option now not ?

	This is a development mailing list; it is great to ask questions around
the code. There are two approaches to Collaboration as you've seen the
COOL approach (poke in #cool-dev on IRC), and the Telepathy approach
that Caolan kindly pointed to below inside LibreOffice.

> Where multiple users should be able to 
> edit the same version. I think that is nice, I prefer to have such a 
> thing more for write, but it is a nice start. I think it is not 100% ok, 
> because I did not get any updated changes of others, or I am not using 
> it correctly.

	The telepathy prototype is no longer included - but the patch Caolan
pointed at has an attempt to pull out a set of 'operations' that might
work for spreadsheets, and could be built on. I expect some of the core
re-factoring to make this easier is still present.

	This mailing list is a great for developers to discuss resurrecting and
extending that - it's a generally useful feature - although it is really
far from trivial to implement, even with the synchronous event model
that was imagined and integral to the Telepathy attempt.

	Personally I'd recommend trying instead to make LOK more deterministic,
and doing this at the LOK user / input event layer: but even that is
rather tricky - consider a sort of some data via a column populated with
=RAND() as a banal example - and needing to synchronize that across
multiple users.

	Anyhow - I'm happy to help with any code suggestions / reviews as/when
you have a core build and are ready to go there. I would recommend reading:

https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/2013-10-09-collaboration.pdf

	first for some more background. We chose to go a different route with
Collabora Online - which should be much easier - but like anything
complex in practice is really hard to get right too =)

	HTH,

		Michael.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Caolán McNamara [mailto:caolanm at redhat.com] 
> Sent: Sunday, December 13, 2020 9:41 PM
> To: Stu
> Cc: libreoffice
> Subject: Re: Is there any effort or discussion yet about collaborative 
> use of libreoffice applications?
> 
> On Sun, 2020-12-13 at 07:56 -0500, Stu wrote:
>> What I was getting at was a way to make a fat client collaborative.
> 
> For a while we have an experimental --enable-telepathy option, so 
> searching for "telepathy libreoffice" will throw up some old attempts 
> similar to that. e.g.
> https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62722 but eventually 
> effort in that direction was dropped with 
> https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=b7b159d79c2b4ec53915e0b9c3e28912c289a5ba

-- 
michael.meeks at collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity
Hangout: mejmeeks at gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks
(M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe